


Phantom Pain

by nightscentedstock



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: M/M, pre-season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:27:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25822885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightscentedstock/pseuds/nightscentedstock
Summary: Ben laments all that cannot be changed.
Relationships: Ben Hargreeves/Klaus Hargreeves
Comments: 3
Kudos: 38





	Phantom Pain

You do not plan on falling in love with Klaus Hargreeves. Knowing him, it is not something you actively ask for. 

You do not beg fate to take a fine red thread and tie your hands together with your adoptive brother, even beyond the grave, no. It doesn’t happen like that.

It happens like a curse. 

Lingering in the air, then wrapping its pale fingers around the hollow heart in your chest it comes for you in a merciless squeeze. Then, the phantom pain, the one you lock away in shame and fight for a chance to replace. 

_ Spitting insults when words of affection beg to roll off of your tongue.  _

Who would beg to fall in love with a trainwreck only to watch it happen from the sidelines again and again and again until you commit every last moment of it to their memory? The crash, the screams, the destruction. Count the seconds on their fingers until the next disaster is bound to strike, then watch paralyzed. 

He knows all his vices, and he hates all of them too. There is no red flag that would go unnoticed. Klaus Hargreeves is like an open book to him, and nothing more than that. You may yell at the pages of the book open in your lap, but it will never change the course of the story.

He only counts the seconds back on his fingers, until the next trainwreck.

There is only that — ghost eyes, your ghost hands, frozen into time. 

_ A witness to his life.  _

First, it feels normal.

If you may call being conjured from the dead normal. Replaying an old dynamic between the two of them, wasting some time before the inevitable would steal him away, sucking him into the light. He has always been a little scared, and nothing changed: The only thing he wants is a little pause, time out, a chance. Klaus provides. 

Then, the inevitable never comes for him. 

And he begins to think of him as home, for the years keep passing by and with time, he can barely remember how the real world felt around him when he used to be alive. Lose context of all that isn’t him.

Like hermits who seclude themselves long enough until they begin to think that nothing exists outside their ten-foot square hut. 

_ Realizing he is your whole world, for a lack of a better word.  _

From there onwards it is more of push and pull, and denial of truths written under his invisible skin. Invisible ink adorning invisible skin, yet it burns. It takes a moment to realize he became your whole world, and the rest of eternity to deal with it. 

He’s always been soft, he’s always been proper, he’s always been trying to please their father. Going down this road leads him towards the opposite of making him proud. Even the mere idea surfacing in his head brands him a failure, a disappointment in his eyes. 

_ Well, death does things to you, it seems. _

When you are adopted into a dysfunctional family, and grow up a ghost, normal is a dream a thousand nights away. And when you only have your eyes on one person and one person only for over a decade, you either grow to love or to loathe them. At times, both. 

He hates that he must watch him deteriorate, witness a trainwreck from the sidelines. Knowing that when he loses Klaus, both of them would be over. 

At least now they could live within one another. Push, pull, bicker. 

_ Words are never enough, and his hands could never reach. _

Cuddling the phantom pain in his chest, he watches his world slowly decay, clinging into the finest threads of sanity as his actions cry out for help. You can spend all your afterlife with someone and still feel so distant at times, you feel like watching over them through a blackened mirror. He loses himself behind the thick veils of dreams and reality. 

There is no use to say anything. 

For the lack of a better option, he does as a Hargreeves always does. As a Hargreeves is always forced to do.

_ He surrenders himself to the tragedy.  _


End file.
